eLearning journal

Finished !!! Many thanks to Bronwyn for being so patient with me and apologies to the rest of the class for lagging so far behind.

Here is a summary of my evaluation report.

Executive summary

The purpose of this evaluation was to assess the effectiveness of the processes and resources that support new academic staff in using Otago Polytechnic’s (OPs) eLearning technologies (such as Moodle, Elluminate and eXe) for blended and distance delivery. This involved gathering information from several sources using a summative, “multiple methods” evaluation design. Eight new staff completed an online questionnaire indicating their use of technology prior to starting at OP, and the eLearning tools they were required to use once they commenced teaching at OP. In their first six months all the participants were required to learn how to use Moodle and most also had to use Elluminate. Most new staff relied on informal supports to learn how to use these technologies, including colleagues, Moodle champions, EDC staff and online Staff Moodle Resources. However, more than half of the participants were not aware of the range of support systems and resources available, and considered that they were not adequately prepared and supported to use OPs eLearning technologies. Five school managers were interviewed to find out about the processes in their school for introducing new staff to eLearning and eLearning technologies. No schools involved in this project had any formal procedures concerning technology support for new staff, and new staff were either directed to EDC staff, the school Moodle champion, technical support advisor within the school, or to colleagues. Recommendations from this evaluation include ensuring that information about support processes and resources is readily accessible to all staff, especially those who work closely with new staff; establishing a formal Induction process to ensure better initial support for new staff; and the need to continue to seek feedback on the effectiveness of the support processes and resources to ensure they are aligned with staff needs and effective practice.

In last weeks elluminate session we has a very useful discussion with Rachel Byars from Otago Polytechnic describing the needs analysis she carried out for her evaluation project for this course last year.

Her evaluation focussed on the suitability of eLearning options in teaching hotel management; her plan and project can be found here in the course guidebook. Rachel reinforced the benefits of thorough planning, asking the right questions, and using a mixed methods approach (triangulation) to gain a wider perspective. It was really valuable to hear how she had planned and carried out her evaluation, the discoveries she made, and how the outcomes have contributed to her teaching practice.

Thank you Rachel for sharing this with us.

For our second evaluation activity, Mareena and I evaluated OIL module 6: ‘Searching for Information’. In this module, students are taken through a step-by-step process showing how to analyse a topic and develop a search strategy to find relevant information, identify the principle resources for information used in academic study, and use search techniques to effectively find information. I know several of our staff at Otago Polytechnic direct their students to the OIL modules, and Module 6 is often used as a preparation exercise before going to the library for a hands-on with library staff. Then they have the online module to refer back to for reference.

The first thing I thought we needed to do was to put together a quick framework that we could evaluate this resource against. This included presentation (layout, readability etc), organization of content (logical sequence, chunking, navigation, links work, etc), resources and activities (information relevant and current, activities are appropriate and engage users, etc), support and help for users (clear guidelines/instructions provided, etc), and overall effectiveness of the module.

Our evaluation findings have already been posted to Mareena's blog, but I'll add them here for completeness.

Overall we agreed it was an effective learning object with a thoughtful design, easy to use interface, and useful resources.

The aims of lessons were clearly outlined at the very beginning of the module. The site allowed optimum readability with sufficient white space. There weren’t any long scrolling pages. The format was uncluttered and colour and fonts were used effectively and consistently. The writing style was clear and easy to understand. At the end of each lesson there were interactive quizzes to complete that provided instant feedback. This sequence was repeated for all lessons.

Lessons were organized in non threatening way with small chunks of information followed by graphic demos and animations which made the comprehension easier. Specific terminologies appeared in purple with a definition when the mouse hovered over the word/phrases. In addition there was also a glossary page at the end of the module.

The navigation menu appeared on the left hand side on each page offering a choice for the learners to complete the lessons at his/her discretion without following a linear order. There were graphical navigation buttons at the end of each page which allowed the learners to go back and forth from the lessons. There was also a handy print option available for selected pages or the whole module.

Issues / concerns:

We found some of the instructions were not very clear. For example, it was suggested there was a 'Help' for each search tool but it wasn't clear whether this was to be found in the module itself or in a real library search.

Some demos took a long time to download and Mareena lost interest and navigated away from the page, possibly because she was using a dial up connection. I’m on broadband and had no difficulty doing any of the activities or viewing any demos. We wondered if this problem was picked up during initial evaluations of the modules. If these modules were intended to be accessible to a wide range of learners then it needed to avoid slow downloads.

Lack of visual and audio technologies were obvious in the site. Highlighted terminologies with definition could have been much better if sound was attached to them. The option of listening to instructions could have been appealing to auditory learners. Catering for a variety of learning styles would help the learners to engage in the lessons. Incorporating different media types such as sound is something to consider in the future.

The module was very big and it would take a couple of hours to work through it. At the last elluminate session Alex commented that the learning units they develop take no more than 20 minutes to work through, in line with users attention spans.

Some sections are very specific to Otago University library services. The searching skills gained in this module should easily transfer to searching any library, but for novice learners it could be quite confusing. All the modules can be edited and republished (guidelines are provided in the Springboard module), so if this resource was to be used extensively in a particular setting it could be worthwhile customizing these with examples from your own library, although Bronwyn suggested this would require a bit of technical know-how to accomplish.

One of our first tasks in the evaluation course gave us an opportunity to have a look at a case study and get a taste of what evaluation is all about. I hooked up with Mareena for this exercise.

We looked at the Engineering Mechanics case study.

Here's the questions and responses.


What are the key issues?

Is eLearning appropriate for these students? Do they have the required abilities and skills? What support and training would students need to access and use eLearning resources.

He has limited time for developing interactive online resources but has found an online resource that looks useful. Does this resource provide knowledge and/or skills that will be useful for the job?


How can the problem be solved? What strategies can be used?

Need to assess students’ knowledge and use of computers; a questionnaire would be a good tool for this.

It would be useful to trial the eLearning resource with students; this could be done by observing the students using the resource and providing a follow-up interview or questionnaire.

Get feedback on the usefulness of the eLearning resource from teaching staff and from industry representatives; discussion group, individual interview or questionnaire.


How can the evaluation process assist in finding a solution? What type of evaluation is appropriate in this situation?

A well planned and carefully designed formative evaluation should provide information relevant to the specific issues being evaluated. In this example, the evaluation is being used to inform recommendations about the usefulness of eLearning in the course and the effectiveness of the eLearning resource in question.

The evaluation process involves clearly identifying the rationale, purpose and context of an evaluation. This information will then influence the type of evaluation and the choice of methods and instruments that will be used to collect data. Analysis of the data will provide information that can be used to make recommendations. A formal report detailing the evaluation process used and the final recommendations can then be prepared.

The type of evaluation used would be a ‘needs analysis’ to determine whether eLearning is appropriate for teaching and learning in this specific course. A thorough evaluation would help to inform teaching staff of the usefulness and effectiveness of eLearning as well as identifying what additional support students and staff might need, and ensure time and effort is not wasted on implementing and developing resources that may not be useful.

What is evaluation and why is it important?

Evaluation as described in the 'evaluation of eLearning' course, involves critically examining an online programme/course or some aspect of the teaching and learning in order to be able to make an informed judgement about its quality and success. Evaluation is an important component of all stages of instructional design and an essential part of monitoring and improving eLearning practice.


How do you evaluate? What is the evaluation process?

It is important to design and plan your evaluation carefully in order to get information that is useful. Planning should balance the most appropriate ways of gathering information with the time, resources and cost involved in carrying out the evaluation.

Evaluation can be carried out to trial a significant change or new innovative approach or resource prior to introducing it into a programme (needs assessment), during the development and delivery of the course (formative evaluation), and at the completion of a programme/course to determine if the learning outcomes have been met (summative evaluation). In my experience, formative evaluation often occurs in a fairly informal manner based on a teachers perceptions and reflections about how good something will be or has been in the classroom. A more formal evaluation is often carried out at the end of a course, using online or paper-based survey tools, to get feedback from students on student satisfaction, the quality and effectiveness of the learning activities, and the performance of the teacher. This information is used to improve the course in the future and for a teacher's performance review.

The first part of the evaluation process involves identifying the specific purpose and context of the evaluation: What am I evaluating and why? What are the key issues to be considered? What type of evaluation is needed? Who should be involved or consulted as part of the evaluation (stakeholders)?

Next, decide on the methods and instruments for collecting relevant data. A "multiple methods" approach involves using a range of different methods of sampling in order to gather information from many different perspectives (known as triangulation). Methods could include observations, questionnaires, checklists and focus groups. You would need to ensure that this phase is reasonably easy to manage with tools/methods that are simple to administer and organise.

Once the data has been collected, it is analyzed and interpreted, and used to make recommendations relevant to the purpose of the evaluation. A formal report detailing the evaluation process and the final recommendations can then be prepared.


Here's a link to Bronwyn's slide presentation about why evaluation is so important (20 mins). I love the chicken hat!

With my hours reduced this semester at work I'm relishing the opportunity to take a couple of papers as part of my ongoing professional development.

One of these is called Natural World Ko Te Tai Ao, a paper in the Certificate in Mata a Ao Maori offered at Otago Polytechnic, which explores the different views that Maori and non-Maori have in relation to the natural world.

The other papers are part of the Graduate Certificate in Applied eLearning from Manukau Institute of Technology; one of these is Evaluation of eLearning for Effective Practice with Bronwyn Hegarty and a second paper is on a Special Topic which is yet to be decided.

No doubt this is all going to keep me very busy.

A short video from Gilly Salmon about designing for online learning:

Facilitating an online environment has its own set of characteristics and challenges.
When designing online learning, it's more important to drive it from the learning challenge rather than the technology perspective.
You also need to design for student activity rather than delivery of content.
Unlike a classroom setting, all the materials need to be prepared and structured in advance.

Have you been wondering about online surveys, bookmarking, blogging, or podcasting but not really sure where to begin. Here are two websites that provide easy to follow video guides that will be really useful if you are thinking about using more web technologies in your teaching.

Web2practice from JISC Netskills:
So far they have developed five guides explaining technologies like RSS, microblogging (twitter), podcasting and social media. Each guide consists of a short animated video explaining the key concepts, with a useful accompanying short written guide covering potential uses, risks and how to get started.

Teacher training videos from Russell Stannard (principal lecturer in Multimedia/ICT at the University of Westminster):
On this website you will find an extensive set of easy to follow training videos introducing YouTube, iTunes, online surveys (Survey Monkey), delicious, wikis, audacity, camtasia, blogging, and podcasting to name a few. Each title includes a number of short 1-3 minute video clips that you can watch in sequence or view just the parts you are interested in. Russell Stannard has a special interest in english language teaching and a separate collection of videos under that title.

Here's a good way for sharing web resources and reference material with your students using the RSS feeds tools available in Moodle. For example, you can collect bookmarks for your course in delicious (tagged with a name specific to your course) and then set up a feed into your Moodle course that automatically updates as you add more bookmarks.

Here's how to do it:

1. In your Moodle course click the Turn editing on button.
   
2. Find the Blocks editor and add a new 'Remote RSS feeds' block.
3. Click on the editing tool (hand tool) to configure the Feeds block.
4. Click on the 'Manage all my feeds' tab.
5. Find the RSS Feed logo on the website (that's the small orange square shown at the start of this post, labelled RSS or RSS Feed). Right click on the logo and select Copy Link Location or Copy Shortcut. Paste into the space provided to Add a news feed URL. Click the Add button. This feed will now come up in the Feed block on this page.
6. Click on the Configure this block tab.
7. The feed should now be available to select (there may be several feeds shown here depending on how they have been configured in other courses), select your feed/s with a tick. Choose how you want to configure the feed, for example give it a title, provide each links description, and display a link to the original site. Click the Save changes button.
8. This feed will now be displayed and updated automatically in your course.

In tonights social media class Leigh said:

Have you been caught without your WYSIWYG editor yet? You know, when you're leaving a comment on someones blog, or trying to add a description to a photo and the text input box doesn't have the button for creating a link, making bold, or making italic.

Wondering about WYSIWYG? This is the editing toolbar where "what you see is what you get", (aha now the picture makes sense!). If the editor is lacking a few of the essentials you can still add links, formatting etc if you know a bit about html.

So we did a Google search for "what is the HTML for a link?" and W3 gave us all the details on how to do links and more.

Here's some info from W3:

HTML is a language for describing web pages:

• HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language
• HTML is not a programming language, it is a markup language
• A markup language is a set of markup tags

HTML uses markup tags to describe web pages:

• HTML markup tags are usually called HTML tags
• HTML tags are keywords surrounded by angle brackets like <> but with no spaces between brackets and text
  
• HTML tags normally come in pairs like <> and < /b >The first tag in a pair is the start tag, the second tag is the end tag
• Start and end tags are also called opening tags and closing tags.

Angle brackets and key letters are just about all you need. We practiced links, bolding and italics by commenting on the social media blog, and turns out it's not as hard as it looks.
eg (but with no spaces between brackets and text)
< href="url">Link text< /a >
<>Italic text< /i >
<>Bold text< /b >
< scr="image url .jpg">

First, a quick check on wikipedia for delicious and social bookmarking.

What is Delicious?

"Delicious (formerly del.icio.us, pronounced "delicious") is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks.
Delicious uses a non-hierarchical classification system in which users can tag each of their bookmarks with freely chosen index terms (generating a kind of folksonomy). A combined view of everyone's bookmarks with a given tag is available; for instance, the URL "http://delicious.com/tag/wiki" displays all of the most recent links tagged "wiki". Its collective nature makes it possible to view bookmarks added by similar-minded users." (Wikipedia, June 2009)

What is social bookmarking?

"Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata, typically in the form of tags that collectively and/or collaboratively become a folksonomy. Folksonomy is also called social tagging, "the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content".^[1] (Wikipedia June 2009)

Here's a YouTube video showing how to use delicious in the classroom.

So what is a google calendar?

Wikipedia has this to say about Google Calendars:

"Google Calendar is a free time-management web application offered by Google. It became available on April 13, 2006 and is currently in beta stages. While users are not required to have a Gmail account, they are required to have a free Google Account in order to use the software.

Google Calendar allows multiple calendars to be created and shown in the same view. They can also be easily shared, either read-only or with full control, and either with specified people only or with everyone. For example, make one shared calendar for each sports team or club, and a separate calendar for private events. Events from both show up side-by-side on the same calendar, in different colors."

That sounds handy! Here are the steps to set up your own Google calendar.

1. Log into Google.
2. Click the blue link on your google page to Calendar (up at the top).
3. Enter a few events to your calendar.
4. In the left navigation area under My Calendars, click the drop-down menu that is next to your name and then change the colour.
5. Click the same drop-down menu and select Calendar Settings. Change the name, NZ timezone etc. Don't copy the embed code yet. Instead click the link that says Customise colour, size and other options.
6. Adjust settings to a width of 400 pixels (not 800 so that it fits in your blog) and other settings to your liking.
7. Copy the embed code and paste as a new post in your blog.

If you are new to blogging or even not so new, Sue Waters (The Edublogger) provides some helpful technical pointers in her Top 5 mistakes made by new bloggers, with information about:

1. Copying and pasting text written in word into a blog post
2. Using copyright images in blog posts
3. Uploading images from digital cameras without resizing
4. Forgetting to link
5. Copying and pasting other bloggers posts

It's well worth a look, read through the comments as well for other bloggers feedback and extra hints.

A word about The Edublogger. It is "dedicated to helping educational bloggers with emerging technologies in education, share their own experiences and promote the blogging medium. It’s purpose is to share tips, tricks, ideas and provide help to the educational blogging community".

There's lots of useful information on this blog, see the Posts by Topic section down the right. If this sounds like it might be useful to you, then why not subscribe to it.

(Image: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3102/2627669442_ce269e9fb4.jpg, by jenny downing)

I am very disappointed to hear that the National Government has decided to cut funding for the highly successful Enviroschools programme. This programme supports schools to “integrate environmental education into the whole of school life” with the aim of creating “innovative and motivated young people, who instinctively think and act sustainably”. My family has been involved with Enviroschools for several years in Southland and Otago and have seen the positive benefits it has on children, parents and the wider community.

Today we are dealing with huge environmental problems created by our lack of understanding and sheer ignorance in the past, so it seems incredibly short-sighted of the Government to step away and undermine a successful programme that helps to instil environmental awareness and sustainable values in our children, with benefits that extend into the future as they become the adults of tomorrow. So, you have to wonder what the Governments motives are for taking this action to cut funding.

Amongst those who are worried about the Government’s decision are Nick Holmes and Guy Ryan (my nephew), who put together this great video ... “Enviroschools isn't just a kit, it's a part of lives and communities, and to show the importance of education for sustainability”. Nice work!

Chris from Tuesday evenings social media class asked about setting up a twitter feed to her blog. Had wondered how to do that myself so followed the steps that Leigh suggested and there it is over on the right.

To get your own twitter feed:

1. click on the "Get Widget" button (seen at the bottom of my twitter feed)
2. fill in your twitter username in the right-side column and it will display your tweets in the central box
3. select the background colour
4. the Auto Scroll is disabled as a default setting so click on the tick if you want your tweets to scroll through automatically on your blog
5. click on the "Get Widget" button
6. copy the embed code in the pop-up box
7. go back to your blog and click "Customize" in the top right
8. click "Add a Gadget" in the layout boxes and select the HTML/Javascript gadget
9. paste your twitter widget code in the Content box and Save

Wondering what a widget is?
I looked up wikipedia and it can mean a number of things in computing. A simple definition from Widgetbox (where the twitter widget comes from) is

Web widgets are mini, portable-applications that can be added to any web page

There seems to be some overlap in the terms widget and gadget if you look up gadget on wikipedia. Is there any difference between these terms or are they referring to the same thing, at least for the general masses?

So here's the follow-on video of How to make a video using Camstudio, it shows how to add the title and credits to a video recording using Windows movie maker. I'm thinking that screen recordings could be useful for showing staff how to use Moodle or other applications. In addition screen recordings could be used for showing off-campus students how to access their online courses and other features of their course.

1. Open Windows movie maker.
2. From left options 1, import video.
3. From left options 2, add titles.
4. Option 3, save to my computer.
5. Name movie and set location to save.
6. Click show more choices and select other settings, then select 'High quality video large'. Then click next. The movie will open when finished compressing.

Here's the video showing how to use Windows movie maker:



Both Camstudio and Windows movie maker seem relatively easy to use. The biggest difficulty I found was trying to record in a shared office with people coming and going, telephones ringing etc. Most staff here at Otago Polytechnic have shared offices and several have mentioned this as a problem when using Audacity. I wonder whether we should have a room provided on campus that could be booked for recording purposes, or do we already have this?

With heavy snow overnight, Dunedin turned into a winter wonderland. With schools closed and hill roads treacherous, we had the day at home. Thought I'd turn my photos from today into a Flickr slideshow to share.



Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

This is how I embedded the Flickr slideshow on my blog using flickrSLiDR to create the embed code:

Create a Flickr account if you don't already have one and upload some photos. Organise your photos into a Set.
Open your Set and copy the URL.
Open flickrSliDR and paste your Set URL into the URL space.
Add the width and height. I used 500 x 400. Click on the Create slideshow! button. This creates the embed Code.
Copy and paste the code into your blog.

Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs, competing with Google and Yahoo!. As of June 2008, Technorati indexes 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.<sup>[2]
Wikipedia June 2009

To use Technorati, open it and 'search the blogosphere ...' with your search terms.</sup>

Information about wikispaces and how wikis work can be found at:

Wikispaces

Wikipedia

YouTube:




Here is my wikispace

Once you have a wiki account and have created a new wiki, follow these guidelines from wikispaces to get started:

Getting Started

• Click on the edit button above to put your own content on this page.
• To invite new members, click on Manage Wiki and Invite People.
• To change your wiki's colors or theme, click on Manage Wiki and Look and Feel.
• To set who can view and edit your wiki, click on Manage Wiki and Permissions

Need Help?

• Click on the help link above to learn more about how to use your wiki.

Here is a link to the workshop wiki

1. Download and install Camstudio.
2. Open Camstudio, open region and select fixed region, set to 640 x 480.
3. Open Options and set to record from microphone and autopan.
4. In options, click audio options and click the volume button, then advance microphone button and tick the 1MIC boost option (windows only).
5. Click the record button. Position the mouse over recording area and click again to record.
6. The recording region will track your mouse (move your mouse slowly and deliberately).
7. Click stop. Name the file and save (wait while it will be compressing in the background). When finished the movie will open.

1. Open Windows movie maker.
2. From left options 1, import video.
3. From left options 2, add titles.
4. Option 3, save to my computer.
5. Name movie and set location to save.
6. Click show more choices and select other settings, then select 'High quality video large'. Then click next. The movie will open when finished compressing.

This video is now ready for publishing online ie YouTube.

The video below shows how to set up Camstudio for recording. In my excitement I forgot to mention that once you have all the settings, hit the red record button and place the recording frame where you want to begin recording from (it's not recording yet), then left click and it will start recording.



I've now added the follow on video showing how to use Windows movie maker in this posting.